Opening Reception for mayfield brooks’ Whale Fall With Me

Tuesday, January 27, 2026 at 4:30pm
Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery

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Free and open to the public.

Whale Fall with Me is a solo exhibition by mayfield brooks, the 2025–2026 CFA Artist in Residence, culminating their multi-year research on the life and death cycle of whales—a project that extends across writing, ’zine making, moving image, and brooks’ embodied practice of vocal and dance improvisation. This opening reception will include remarks at 4:30pm in the gallery lobby. 

At the center of the installation is a newly-commissioned film focusing on the third chapter of brooks’ Whale Fall trilogy. Created as a site specific performance on the 1885 Tall Ship Wavertree in the care of the South Street Seaport Museum in New York, and at Rockaway Beach in Queens, New York where the artist lives—this film brings together multiple strands of the artist’s exploration of the “whale fall” (an ecosystem process that occurs when a whale carcass sinks to the bottom of the ocean, its body feeding an entire world of creatures from the largest apex predators to the smallest microorganisms). Considering this phenomenon as more than an ecological event, brooks has used whale song and even the history of whaling (one of the first integrated industries relying heavily on Black and Indigenous labor) to imagine death as one of the most powerful life-giving forces in the universe. At its core, the whale fall asks: what becomes possible, inevitable, and necessary when systems break down? Whale Fall with Me gestures towards decomposition as a world-making force, a practice of liberation, a process of unbecoming that feeds a different existence.

Exhibition on display through Sunday, March 1, 2026.

Learn more about mayfield brooks' residency at Wesleyan. 

mayfield brooks improvises while black and is based in Lenapehoking, the unceded land of the Lenape people. brooks is a movement-based performance artist, vocalist, urban farmer, writer, and wanderer. brooks teaches and performs practices that arise from Improvising While Black (IWB). brooks is the 2025–2026 CFA Artist in Residence.

Admission is free, and everyone is welcome. We encourage you to RSVP to help us with our planning and to get a reminder the day before this event. While RSVPs are not required for entry, they are a big help! While you're on campus, feel free to talk with our gallery assistants about the exhibitions and other upcoming special programs, like our student-led tours.